Sunday, July 3, 2011
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
mistakes to avoid if you want to get promoted
http://www.phoenix.edu/colleges_divisions/business/articles/2011/04/mistakes-to-avoid-if-you-want-to-get-promoted.html
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Monday, March 7, 2011
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Saturday, December 4, 2010
Jewel tarnished.....
Dear Ratan....didn't think you would be playing these murky games for some spectrum. but what can I say, a good mango cannot survive in a basket of bad mangoes. Now Ratan is asking the SC to silence the Radiia tapes. Is SC agrees, then it will be a bad day for whistle blowers.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Making money from Excel
Check out chandoo.org for some amazing excel templates. Apparently this entrepreneur makes 100K per year by sharing his templates. As I always say..Sharing is earning......
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
What is OODA loop
OODA is Observing an attack, orientating itself, deciding what to do about it and then acting ! Since this happens in a set order and can be repeated, its called OODA loop.
Monday, January 12, 2009
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Stop complaining and do something else shutup
Atlast an sensible article on how to deal with the Mumbai attacks by Tarun Tejpal of tehelka.
I am too tired of reading about bombing Pakistan or to stop paying taxes or other absurdity.
I am too tired of reading about bombing Pakistan or to stop paying taxes or other absurdity.
Monday, November 24, 2008
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Scrum...Introduction
I recently attended a certified scrum master training and I am now a certified scrum master (CSM). Although I was not new to scrum, my real life experience is less. I am writing this post so that I can revise my training and to explain scrum to others.
Scrum is the Project Management methodology that is an offshoot from Lean manufacturing, agile methodology and other result oriented methodologies.
'Scrum' term was first published by two Japanese professors (Hirotaka Takeuchi, Ikujiro Nonaka, ) in their seminal article " The New New Product Development Game" published in Harvard Business Review. In this article, the professors researched various companies like Fuji, Xerox, HP and Canon and compared their result oriented management philosophy to the game of rugby. In one example, one company shipped a cross functional team of engineers, testers, marketing guys and others to a remote location and asked them to come up with an revolutionary product. The interesting thing was that there were no managers among this team. In most cases these groups came up with new products, some great, some good and some average but all showed improvement from current products. This the authors likened to a scrum.
In rugby, one team forms a group called as scrum and tries to take the ball across to the other side while passing among themselves and also protecting the scrum. Every time the ball is taken to the opponent side, a sprint is completed. Scrum seemed to be a self contained organism and that's what the Professors were hinting for corporations to do to reduce time-to-market while keeping quality issues at a minimum.
The next iteration on scrum as a Management framework was started when Ken Schwaber and Chris Sutherland working independent implemented scrum in their companies. Later on they collaborated and presented a paper where they explained their methodology, its results and finally its implementation results. Ken Schwaber then in 2001 wrote the bible of scrum "Agile Software Development with SCRUM". At around the same time, a group of enlightened software engineers came up with the Agile manifesto , considered to be a declaration of war against waste and mismanagement in S/W management and moving away from organized Project Management.
Introduction video to scrum from the godfather of scrum Ken Schwaber.
The main philosophy of scrum is to build huge applications piecemeal like creating a house, brick by brick in this case sprint by sprint.
Timeboxing: The other concept is time boxing the development to a sprint so that developers can focus on getting things done without things continuously added to their plate.
Shippable code: Every sprint finishes with code that is tested and ready to ship.
Constant improvement: Since each sprint is comparatively smaller, scrum teams can add additionally functionality in the subsequent sprints. This keeps the Product owner happy as he/she can see actual implementation and can plan for adding or improving the application.
Since the sprints are also of smaller duration, management reporting can be done faster and decisions like add more staff or to yank the plug etc can be taken faster.
The above method avoids the pitfalls in the water-fall approach where we plan huge projects and plan for separate phases like analysis, coding and testing and each phase creates numerous artifacts (some needed and some unnecessary) most of which might not even be used. Now by the time the product is ready to be implemented, there are huge quality issues, project has overrun budget and to add insult to injury the product is obsolete. One such spectacular failures are Windows Vista (Begun in May 2001 planned to be implemented by Dec 2003 but finally ready by in Jan 2007). More examples can be found in the internet.
Before we discuss Scrum in detail, let us discuss one of the high profile successes using scrum in google. Adwords, one of the most important projects in google was implemented using scrum.
See below video on how google implemented scrum.
Scrum is the Project Management methodology that is an offshoot from Lean manufacturing, agile methodology and other result oriented methodologies.
'Scrum' term was first published by two Japanese professors (Hirotaka Takeuchi, Ikujiro Nonaka, ) in their seminal article " The New New Product Development Game" published in Harvard Business Review. In this article, the professors researched various companies like Fuji, Xerox, HP and Canon and compared their result oriented management philosophy to the game of rugby. In one example, one company shipped a cross functional team of engineers, testers, marketing guys and others to a remote location and asked them to come up with an revolutionary product. The interesting thing was that there were no managers among this team. In most cases these groups came up with new products, some great, some good and some average but all showed improvement from current products. This the authors likened to a scrum.
In rugby, one team forms a group called as scrum and tries to take the ball across to the other side while passing among themselves and also protecting the scrum. Every time the ball is taken to the opponent side, a sprint is completed. Scrum seemed to be a self contained organism and that's what the Professors were hinting for corporations to do to reduce time-to-market while keeping quality issues at a minimum.
The next iteration on scrum as a Management framework was started when Ken Schwaber and Chris Sutherland working independent implemented scrum in their companies. Later on they collaborated and presented a paper where they explained their methodology, its results and finally its implementation results. Ken Schwaber then in 2001 wrote the bible of scrum "Agile Software Development with SCRUM". At around the same time, a group of enlightened software engineers came up with the Agile manifesto , considered to be a declaration of war against waste and mismanagement in S/W management and moving away from organized Project Management.
Introduction video to scrum from the godfather of scrum Ken Schwaber.
The main philosophy of scrum is to build huge applications piecemeal like creating a house, brick by brick in this case sprint by sprint.
Timeboxing: The other concept is time boxing the development to a sprint so that developers can focus on getting things done without things continuously added to their plate.
Shippable code: Every sprint finishes with code that is tested and ready to ship.
Constant improvement: Since each sprint is comparatively smaller, scrum teams can add additionally functionality in the subsequent sprints. This keeps the Product owner happy as he/she can see actual implementation and can plan for adding or improving the application.
Since the sprints are also of smaller duration, management reporting can be done faster and decisions like add more staff or to yank the plug etc can be taken faster.
The above method avoids the pitfalls in the water-fall approach where we plan huge projects and plan for separate phases like analysis, coding and testing and each phase creates numerous artifacts (some needed and some unnecessary) most of which might not even be used. Now by the time the product is ready to be implemented, there are huge quality issues, project has overrun budget and to add insult to injury the product is obsolete. One such spectacular failures are Windows Vista (Begun in May 2001 planned to be implemented by Dec 2003 but finally ready by in Jan 2007). More examples can be found in the internet.
Before we discuss Scrum in detail, let us discuss one of the high profile successes using scrum in google. Adwords, one of the most important projects in google was implemented using scrum.
See below video on how google implemented scrum.
Friday, November 14, 2008
Create great mockups
I was recently researching tools for creating website mock ups and I fumbled into balsamiq. A very cool mockup site. It helps you create mockups for more than web pages and the beauty of it is ...its very simple and cheap too.
The UI looks very simple and its deliberate. Love this.
The UI looks very simple and its deliberate. Love this.
Monday, September 22, 2008
Free university courses
These are some great universities offering their courses , assignments and lecture notes free on the web. This is part of an initiative called as OCW-Open Courseware.
Knowledge grows when its shared.
UC Berkeley
open2.net
MIT
Stanford
Knowledge grows when its shared.
UC Berkeley
open2.net
MIT
Stanford
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Free background check
Now you can do free background checks on just names
criminalsearches
or If you are searching for apartments, check the below link out. it gives location of various crimes that happened in the vicinity of an address.
criminalsearches.com/neighborhood
criminalsearches
or If you are searching for apartments, check the below link out. it gives location of various crimes that happened in the vicinity of an address.
criminalsearches.com/neighborhood
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Can you Dance !!!
Check this out...Bollywood style dance on American Primetime. and guess what..it was done very well.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Free rice!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Check out this site. If you answer the meaning of a word correctly, then this site's sponsors will donate 20 grains of rice to World Food program to feed the hungry. Not you, the dieter but the really hungry.
Now that a swell idea.
Stop reading and do some good and improve your vocubalury. Share what you ...............
Now that a swell idea.
Stop reading and do some good and improve your vocubalury. Share what you ...............
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
$20 trick at Las Vegas
I just heard about this neat trick. If you are in Las Vegas and if you are booking a room, hand in a $20 note along with your credit card and very innocently ask if there is a complimentary upgrade available.
If there is, then you got a great deal for $20 else the clerk will return the $20.
Risk free way to get a great upgrade.
If there is, then you got a great deal for $20 else the clerk will return the $20.
Risk free way to get a great upgrade.
Friday, May 30, 2008
Cheap Pino Grigios
I love white wines and Pino Grigios are my favorite. Correction..Cheap Pino Grigios are my favorite. Here are some good ones from wsj.com
Barefoot Cellars Pinot Grigio Nonvintage (California). $5.99
Good/Very Good
Crisp, clean and well conceived, with tangy fruit and vibrant flavors of white peaches, lime and some earth. This is a steal.
The Hogue Cellars Pinot Grigio 2007 (Columbia Valley). $6.99
Very Good
Best value. Clean, bright, fresh and utterly winning. Fun and alive, with all sorts of tastes of just-picked fruit. Another reasonably priced winner from Hogue
Wine by Joe Pinot Gris 2006 (Oregon). $12.00*
Good/Very Good
Rounder than most, with some honey and plenty of ripe lemon-lime fruit. Nicely crisp on the finish.
Barefoot Cellars Pinot Grigio Nonvintage (California). $5.99
Good/Very Good
Crisp, clean and well conceived, with tangy fruit and vibrant flavors of white peaches, lime and some earth. This is a steal.
The Hogue Cellars Pinot Grigio 2007 (Columbia Valley). $6.99
Very Good
Best value. Clean, bright, fresh and utterly winning. Fun and alive, with all sorts of tastes of just-picked fruit. Another reasonably priced winner from Hogue
Wine by Joe Pinot Gris 2006 (Oregon). $12.00*
Good/Very Good
Rounder than most, with some honey and plenty of ripe lemon-lime fruit. Nicely crisp on the finish.
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